Bearded Lady by Mara Altman Read Free Book Online Page B

humane. I was also having trouble letting go of the hair. I hadn’t come to an understanding with my body hair, yet. That is, I still didn’t really like it. I felt guilty for favoring my leg without the hair, being so thrilled with how smooth it looked, that is until I sat down and spoke to my mother. I’d been putting it off, but it was time since it was our last day of the trip. She would be going back to California and I would be heading back to New York.
    My Mom and Dad were sitting on wooden chaise lounges on the beach. My Mom was in sunglasses, a hat and bathing suit, comfortably showing off her legs and pits. They weren’t as intense as I remembered them. I don’t think an astronaut would be able to see them from space, which is how I used to feel when she’d pick me up after school, waving for me to come with her tank tops on. I sat down beside her, crossing my hairless leg under the hairy other one. “So, were you guys bummed when I started shaving?”
    “I wasn’t that happy about it,” said my Dad. “Natural is better, but it’s your business. I just thought it might be a problem for you later, get you on the wrong track.”
    “Which track?” I asked.
    “Well, you cut your hair and they branch and then you cut it again and they branch.”
    “Are you thinking about pruning trees?” I said.
    “Yeah,” he said, “that’s how I see it.”
    I’d always assumed that my Mom didn’t shave because of her radical self-acceptance — and I yearned to be like that, to accept myself in my All Natural state — but we never really had a conversation about it before, so she elaborated. “I got into the politics,” she said. “I also read a lot of Zen and Buddhist texts and it really felt like accepting who I was more important to me than looking a certain way for society.”
    As she said that, something clicked for me that hadn’t before. I realized that if she was so into accepting who she was and all the hair she had, then why did she bleach her mustache hair? They seemed to contradict each other.
    “Well, if you’re so Zen and comfortable with yourself,” I said, “then why do you wax your upper lip?”
    She paused to think about it for a moment. She started and then stopped. Then started again. “I guess you’re right,” she said. “I wax my upper lip and I think my face looks better when I take it off. It’s probably that it worked into my cosmetic feeling about myself, so I guess I can’t claim to be this Zen person who would flaunt all.”
    We talked a bit more, but it was that answer that really blew me away, though I wasn’t able to see the repercussions of that conversation until I was back in New York.
    For the moment, I just thought it completely coincidental that on that evening, alone in my hotel room, I decided to shave off all the hair I’d grown for the past two months.
     
    ***
     
    Last night — weeks after we got back from Southeast Asia — I was sitting on the sofa with Dave in our East Village apartment. I hadn’t done laser for nine months. I’d just finished writing the 13,300 words you just read. I put a sofa pillow in my lap and inched toward the corner of the couch. I stared at him until he looked away from a Law & Order: Special Victims Unit rerun, the one where some guy has a fetish for recording people urinating in public bathrooms and accidentally witnesses a pedophilic sex crime. Maybe I could have waited for better timing.
    Or maybe, maybe it was the perfect time.
    “What?” Dave said, noticing that I was focused on him, not on Detective Stabler’s interrogation.
    “I want you to know that I have chin hairs,” I said.
    He smiled slightly, cocked his head to the side, and returned his focus to the fetishist.
    “I’m serious. I do.”
    Dave looked over at me now, searching his mind for the appropriate thing to say, but I didn’t give him a chance to respond. I told him in rapid-fire narrative the whole story of my hair fixation as fast as the man in